ANKARA: Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu yesterday denounced a European court ruling against Turkey’s compulsory religion courses, calling them a necessary tool to fight Islamic radicalisation.
The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on Tuesday that compulsory religion courses in Turkish public schools violated educational freedoms, and called on Turkey to reform its school curriculum.
“If proper religion is not taught, it produces unhealthy and incorrect religious information that leads to the radicalisation seen in our neighbouring countries,” Davutoglu said during a joint conference with the education minister in Ankara.
Davutoglu was apparently referring to the extremist Islamic State group that has seized swathes of Iraq and Syria and is holding 49 Turks abducted from the Turkish consulate in Mosul in Iraq in June. He rejected claims that his Islamic-rooted government was using religion courses as a tool of coercion on children whose parents do not practice Turkey’s dominant Sunni Islam.
“In some countries students are even taken to church as part of religion and morality classes. It’s impossible for us to ignore this,” he said. “Just like I should know about Marxism despite the fact that I am not a Marxist, it is necessary for an atheist to have knowledge of religious culture.”
South Sudan won’t expel foreign workers
JUBA: The government in war-torn South Sudan said yesterday it will not be expelling any foreign workers, reversing a policy announcement made the previous day that caused a storm of protests from aid agencies and neighbouring countries.
According to the United Nations, 1.3 million people have been displaced internally, and many of them are dependent on free food, shelter and healthcare delivered by a network of international aid groups.
Overturning an earlier order, Foreign Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin stressed the government “is not expelling any foreign worker in South Sudan.”
On Tuesday, the government published a decree ordering NGOs, private companies, hotels, banks, insurance, telecommunications and petroleum companies “to notify all aliens working with them in all positions to cease working” within a month.
It said the resulting vacancies, ranging from receptionists to company directors, should be filled by government-vetted South Sudanese nationals. But yesterday, Minister of Labour Ngor Kolong Ngor backpeddled to clarify the ministry’s circular, saying they were only “targeting low-level positions”.
France drops case against Iranian dissidents
PARIS: Prosecuting judges in Paris yesterday dropped all charges of money laundering and fraud against nine people close to an exiled Iranian opposition group more than 10 years after they were arrested on terrorism charges.
The five women and four men were among 167 sympathisers of the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) who were rounded up in 2003 during a police raid on the ouskirts of Paris for questionning over possible links to terrorism and suspicion of money laundering.
Twenty-four people were originally placed under formal investigation, including Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the PMOI’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), on suspicion of “associating with wrongdoers in relation with a terrorist undertaking”.
Agencies
